a. Field of invention
This invention pertains to a system provided to check the balance of a rigid or flexible rotor at operational speeds and if the rotor is unbalanced, a precision balancing procedure is used to remove excess material from the rotor with a laser.
b. Background of the invention
Conventional rotor balancing methods were tedious and labor intensive. These methods comprised mounting the rotor on a balance machine, turning the rotor to find the imbalance locations, dismounting the rotor, grinding or drilling excess material away from the rotor and remounting the rotor to determine its balance. Since it was difficult to determine the amount of material removed, the whole operation had to be repeated many times and was frequently based on trial-and-error.